On April 23, 2015 during the undergraduate poster session, the 2015 inductees of the Society of Physics Students (SPS) were announced. SPS mentor and Prof. Phil Barbeau shared some history: SPS at Duke is the the second oldest SPS chapter in the country. Barbeau also presented the six new members with certificates and invited them to sign their names in a book kept since 1925.
During the April 23rd undergraduate poster session, the 2015 Daphne Chang Memorial Award recipient was announced. The award is presented each year to students who excel in undergraduate research in the department. Prof. Steffen A. Bass shared the history of Daphne and the meaning behind the award, which may be read here. This year's award goes to junior Melody Lim. Congratulations to Lim on this honor!
The annual undergraduate poster session was held on Wednesday, April 23, 2015. Eleven students displayed and presented their research. Awards for First, Second and Third place were determined by a panel of judges and presented by Director of Undergraduate Studies and Prof. Kate Scholberg.
Third place prize was a tie between Katrina Miller and Lydia Thurman. Here they are proudly sharing the honor:
In February, an international group of physicists came together to form a proto-collaboration to build the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment. A follow-up to the currently operating Super-Kamiokande experiment, Hyper-Kamiokande would enclose almost a megaton of water and be more than twenty times larger than its predecessor. Hyper-Kamiokande is designed to study neutrino oscillations, astrophysical sources of neutrinos such as supernova and the stability of matter.
In the field of physics, it’s considered de rigueur to complete a postdoctoral position, or postdoc, after earning a PhD and before beginning a faculty job. “It’s expected that you’re going to broaden beyond your PhD work,” says Duke Physics Interim Chair and Prof. Dan Gauthier. “Search committees want to see to what extent you were able to jump into another lab and another environment, and to what extent you’re able to come up to speed quickly and start to generate publications.
As program chair of the 2015 April Meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, MD, Prof. Berndt Mueller had the pleasure of participating in a special dinner honoring the three plenary speakers of the Kavli Memorial session. The photo below shows (from left to right): John Mather (NASA - leader of the COBE experiment), Kate Kirby (CEO of the APS), Stuart Shapiro (Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Clifford Will (Univ. of Florida), and Prof. Mueller. In the plenary session on May 13 sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, Prof.
Prof. Maiken Mikkelsen, with others, has been published in Nature Communications. Read the paper "Real-time tunable lasing fram plasmonic nanocavity arrays" online here.
Graduate student Georgios Laskaris successfully defended his thesis "Photodisintegration of 3He with Double Polarizations" on April 6th, 2015. Laskaris has been a member of the Medium Energy Physics group of Duke University since the winter of 2008 and performed all of his thesis experiments at the HIgS facility of TUNL under the supervision of Prof. Haiyan Gao. Laskaris will join Prof. Giorgio Gratta's group at Stanford University in Neutrino Physics.
David Rosin, who did his PhD research with Prof. Daniel Gauthier and received his degree from the Technical University in Berlin (co-supervised by Eckehard Schoell there), recently won prizes for his dissertation. He won the Springer Dissertation Award and his thesis was published by Springer (available on Amazon). He also competed and co-won the Dissertation Prize of the German Physical Society. He was one of four finalists for this prize.
Department of Physics
